“One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.” – Pauline Kael

Month: May 2008

Rocket Science is neither flawed nor tarnished, what it is… is, err… astute, and almost faultless – it also provides evidence for my thesis in waiting that a film’s quality can be correlated directly with the strength of its soundtrack.

Once again I think I may have been fed a heavily censored version of a video nasty, in this case Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, a film that has a lot to answer for, namely making Eli Roth think he has a justification for making flicks with a lame quota beyond 80% of their running time.

A non-event, a specialty of director Eli Roth, is all that can be said about this tepid gore-fest – Hostel: Part II attempts to push the boundaries, but when the moment arrives to execute a child, something that Eli thought would really get him noticed the moment is spurious, arbitrary and something he eventually bottles out on, Roth you are yet to convince me you are anything other than a shower, and that reminds me of one of the film’s finer moments, visually at least… see below.

Die Hard 4.0 isn’t brilliant, but neither does it detract from the franchise, so basically all is well – especially when Bruce gets busy driving a SUV through a building, over a hot karate kung-fu piece in tight black slacks, and down a lift shaft…

Special, cute and considered, Eagle vs. Shark is guaranteed to have you shouting the word ‘horse’ seemingly randomly to anyone who is yet to have seen this creatively vibrant and unassuming piece of cinema.

The weakest of the original trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is still unbelievably watchable, with the highlights of the delayed arrival on screen of Dr. Henry Jones Sr, River Phoenix and the well postured, impeccably costumed and hard-edge beauty of Dr. Elsa Schneider.

Top Gun with cars, Days of Thunder is always going to be an inferior flick, though there isn’t much better than MIG’s and Falcon’s tearing up the sky, so just enjoy Duvall’s sexual relationship with the car he builds and the moment where Cole Trickle (how fucking ace is that name?) in defeat decides in a destructive moment of majesty to gloriously total Russ Wheeler on his victory lap – wanton recklessness never disappoints.

Recommended to me a long time ago by a layered piece of cute in Nike Air Max, because it made one of my former lecturers (a leading and published authority on Tarantino nonetheless) cry like a baby, Now, Voyager is almost perfect… you need to know nothing more than, “don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

Noir-ish and superb to the last, yet unfortunately tarnished due to the extreme difficultly for a viewer to get past Soderbergh’s persistence in using The Good German to let all watching be abundantly clear that he has indeed seen movies such as The Third Man and Casablanca, well done Stevie!

Get your ass to Mars, or just watch this and worship the brilliance of Paul Verhoeven, arguably the most hit and miss director still allowed behind a camera bar Joel Schumacher – Total Recall is how action sci-fi is meant to be!